Month: May 2015

In the following blog the authors of the third edition of a leading text on the Law of the ECHR (Harris, O’Boyle and Warbrick, The Law of the European Convention on Human Rights, David Harris, Michael O’Boyle, Ed Bates and Carla Buckley, OUP, 2014) look back to the circumstances surrounding the publication of the first edition, in 1995, as a basis for reflection for today, with talk of the UK’s withdrawal from the Convention in the air. A significant part of what follows draws on the Preface to the third edition of the authors’ book, the intention being to bring the comments made there to a broader audience than the book itself would have reached. The post that follows is written in the authors’ personal capacity.

Back in 1995 the Preface to the first edition of Harris, O’Boyle and Warbrick noted that the growth of support for a bill…

Editors’ note: This blog post is followed by a lengthy annex of substantial quotations from judicial lectures.

The Conservative party’s manifesto promise to make ‘our own Supreme Court the ultimate arbiter of human rights matters in the UK’, and their previous references to making the Supreme Court ‘supreme’ on human rights issues, suggests a high level of trust in the domestic judiciary to resolve human rights issues. If so, their views on the role of the ECHR should be taken very seriously. They should in any case, of course, for judges have been at the coalface, so to speak, applying ‘Convention rights’ in domestic law for nearly fifteen years now. Over that time the judiciary have evolved and adapted their approach. There have been examples of fruitful judicial dialogues between the UK courts and Strasbourg on certain human rights questions, demonstrating that the relationship is not a ‘top-down’ one, but one…